Chapter 6: Crafting Understandings

This book is making me question my own teaching practices and how I create units and objectives. Chapter 6 is about “Crafting Understandings”. Understandings in this chapter are elaborated more and see as an important inference, transferable idea, abstract, and acquired best by uncovering and creating with them. This chapter reinforces that teachers can’t simply stand in front of the class utter out facts for students to memorize. Instead, they should be giving students opportunities to work with content activity and question it and also building inference skills.

To form understandings teachers should ask themselves, “Students should understand that…” And teachers should create two kinds of understandings, overarching and topical (just like the formation of Essential questions). I interpret, according to the text; teachers should focus on overarching understandings because these give students more of a chance to connect different content areas. They also give students the chance to make real world connections.

Understanding how to create understandings is an important ability teachers should have. I feel that if teachers know thoroughly what they want their students to understand and take away from the lesson then they can create assessments and units that challenge students to critically think. It can also help students understand why they are learning what they are learning. I often remember memorizing facts in school, but never knew why I had to learn them.

In my lesson plans, I never really have focused specially on creating understandings. I always thought that is what the objectives were. But the way they explained how understandings work in the learning process makes me excited to try to start using them. I have always wanted to get my students thinking deeper and more critical. I think one of the things I have to do is focus more of my attention on knowing the understandings I want my students to take away from my units. 

Chapter 5: Essential Questions: Doorways to Understanding

After reading chapter 5, it seems that essential questions are the backbone of a unit. Teachers should base their units on their questions because it helps elicit students to see interesting or alternative views of a topic. It supports students uncovering content, not just learning facts and memorizing information. They need to lead to deeper understanding and provoke students to ask more questions. Essential questions should cover more than just content and/or topic. They need to be able to be overarching the whole subject in order to provide students with the opportunity to ask more questions or more deeply understand the topic.

This is an important chapter to read because it holds a lot of information about forming the back bone to your lessons. Essential questions help teachers be able to structure their units and lessons to focus on teaching students how to show their understanding. Without using essential questions, lessons may not capture students’ interest or they may not be focused enough to keep students thinking about the topic.

After reflecting on my practice, I have realized that I do not use essential questions properly. I normally just take the big question that the curriculum provides and use that to introduce the lesson. I haven’t been using them to provoke deeper thinking in my students. I normally just use it as an attention grabber and by the end of the lesson my students have lost interest in my lesson. I do however ask good topic questions that give my students opportunities to answer with more than one answer. These questions normally have students support their answers with evidence. The next unit I plan, I am going to try and focus more on the essential questions I use and move away from the curriculum based big questions.  

Chapter 4: The Six Facets of Understanding

So far in the book Understanding has been viewed as the ability to do something with knowledge that is learned and used in social relations, but it also has other dimensions that are elaborated in this chapter. They are all seen in some part of backwards design. The six signs that students can show understanding are: can explain, interpret, apply, have perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge of different themes learned about in their school. Each facet of knowledge is important and can be done in different ways in the lessons.

I think it is important for teachers to take the time to reflect and see if they are accomplishing all of these facets in their lessons. These are all key elements to make sure that students are learning and not just memorizing facts. They are especially important because each of these facets helps develop a well-rounded citizen that will be able to participate in society in the future.

Honestly, before reading this chapter I only had one view of understanding which was that students can apply knowledge to another context to use it. I never thought about students demonstrating understanding through empathy, perspective, or self-knowledge. Even though I never thought about it actively, I think I subconsciously added parts of these into my lessons. I usually and form my students lessons to make them aware of their surroundings so they can empathize and see others perspectives and interpret different situations. I normally also add in a self-reflection part to my classes as well. I guess I am not too horrible at not using them. But this chapter has made me more conscious about the different ways students can understand. I hope that as we continue reading I can start to use them more actively in my planning process.